User talk:Icedragon64
I am a Wikipedia editor, by the same name, as well as an author and top reviewer on NG, also with the same name. I am one of the main workers on the NG page on Wikipedia. I am the main author and organiser of the Dragons & Spirits, a small crew on NG : I no longer have any particular interest in maintaining this wiki, and haven't really done so for a long time. I've made you a sysop, which means you can delete and protect pages, block users, and change the wiki logo. There might be a sudden flood of traffic in October or November if KemCab allows his attempt to make an independent Newgrounds wiki to lapse. I don't have the time to deal with such a flood. If you think you need additional sysops, let me know, and I'll give you bureaucrat permissions. All they do is allow you to make other users into sysops (and bureaucrats). I'm not especially popular on this wiki, so helping you in any meaningful capacity will probably drive users away. I can possibly make some templates for you if you need them (and I can find the time). inclusivedisjunction 01:33, 2 September 2008 (UTC) Greetings I'm sorry to hear you are in low spirits regarding the wiki. I wouldn't mind working more in a while on some stuff. But at the moment, I'm preoccupied with other stuff. I leave it up to you to decide what you wish to do.--Winchestershire 04:23, 30 October 2008 (UTC) January '09 I don't have any criteria for inclusion of crews. I made you a sysop; you can set whatever policies you think are appropriate. A crew being active for at least a year sounds like a decent requirement, but that's up to you. Frankly, I deleted the Uzi Union page over a year ago; I can't recall what reason I had for deleting it. I've restored it, so you can decide for yourself what to do with it. inclusivedisjunction 22:27, 26 January 2009 (UTC) Categories To put something in a category, just add Category:Category at the bottom of the page. For example, to put a page in the category "Crews", add Category:Crews at the bottom. inclusivedisjunction 10:15, 27 January 2009 (UTC) Community discussion There's a Community Forum (accessible through the "Community" link on the left-hand navbar). You can also create pages in the "Wikigrounds:" namespace to propose an idea and call for votes. inclusivedisjunction 01:56, 2 July 2009 (UTC) Crew template I've made a basic template at Template:Crew. Let me know if you need any changes / additions. inclusivedisjunction 01:47, October 13, 2009 (UTC) To-do list I assume you're referring to Wikigrounds:To-do list. Some other people may have had their own to-do lists on their user pages as well. inclusivedisjunction 01:59, December 4, 2009 (UTC) Got your message I think our priority right now should be getting rid of the garbage pages like I found and completing as much of the To-do list as possible. I think I'm starting to get decent at making articles for flash games and movies, and looking for junk happens to be a specialty of mine. I think we might want to start a thread sooner rather than later, in order to get some help. This job is pretty big for a dragon, a noob, and the occasional unregistered user. Salnax December 10, 2009 I've thought about it a bit, and I'd guess the ideal minimum page should be about 100 words long. That's enough space so that the subject is described in some detail and the writer must at least have a clue what he's writing about. It should be expanded further, but regular encyclopedias have articles this long, so that's a decent start. As for links, I think we might want to be merciful to people who don't include them. A lot of people stumbling into Wikigrounds would have no idea how wikis work, and would just write a chunk of text before saying "Mission Accomplished." So long as its obvious what they're writing about, it should be easy to just throw a link or two in their articles when necessary. If its not obvious, than their article is probably garbage, and should be deleted. Salnax December 13, 2009 10:25 GMT Names I'm not sure what the motivation is for using real names, although its fairly popular on social networking sites. If the person is famous for something they did outside of Newgrounds, like Adam Fulton (LiveCorpse) or Jeff Weise, its certainly justifiable. inclusivedisjunction 17:09, December 14, 2009 (UTC) Loose Ends I'll start going through the full list of articles and see if anything looks particularly garbagey or vulnerable to spam. I don't have many friends on Newgrounds yet, but I have some friends in real life who regularly visit the site but are not members. I'll ask them what they think. As for the thread, I think we should just explain that we are making a Newgrounds encyclopedia, and we're looking for help. Try to avoid highlighting articles that simply invite vandalism (Crews, Administrators, Memes, etc.) and instead focus on things that encourage people to cooperate (Specific Movies, Games, popular Artists, etc.) I think that a lot of people who might be tempted to trash StrawberryClock's article might instead write an article on their particular favorite flash if we word things properly. As for our lack of current activity, I see no reason why we should mention it. Incidentally, I've been looking at that wikia icon on the top left corner and have been wondering how we replace it with something better suited for Newgrounds. Do you know how to replace it and what we might replace it with? Wish your brother luck for me.--Salnax 01:31, December 17, 2009 (UTC) You may have noticed that I just made a bunch of minor edits. Just so you know, this is part of my going through the articles on this site. Today, I viewed everything from "Fail!" pic to Luis. Hopefully, I'll be able to make a list of articles we really need to work over the next two weeks. We can do this!--Salnax 02:52, December 17, 2009 (UTC) You know where it says "We are currently editing over 156 articles?" I clicked on the number and a list of every article we have popped up. I copied and pasted it onto a word document, and am going through it alphabetically, checking to see what's good and what's garbage or incomplete. When I'm done, I'll put up a blog of articles I think we really need to work on. As for the top right corner, I think we might want a symbol like other wikis have. You know, like Wikipedia has a globe in the top left corner, the Mario wiki has a picture of Mario, stuff like that. Maybe we could have a picture of the NG tank? I think it would make us seem more professional. I'll take care of the Fancypants article. It just needs a bit of work.--Salnax 16:51, December 17, 2009 (UTC) I just finished going through all the articles. I made a blog listing the good articles, incomplete articles, and articles I think we should make a priority of, based on the fact that they're incomplete yet are important. Check it out. I'm going to work on Afro-Ninja, who has won over 40 awards in flash and is a moderator, but only has a paragraph and profile chart. Happy Kwanzaa Christmas! Sorry I haven't been around here much in a while. Between the end of the school term, work, and the holidays, I have been pretty busy. Sorry to hear that you've been feeling poorly. Notability is a bit tough to make a crieria for, but I've got a few ideas. *If a Flash is featured in "Flash Portal History" or has a 'major' award (Weekly Choice, Contest Winner, Tank Award nominations, etc.), it deserves its own article. If it has a certain number of views, say, a quarter or half million or so, it is probably well known enough to deserve an article. I don't think we should make articles based on scores and reviews: those change a lot over time, and the top rated flash tends to be whatever has only been around for a short while. *An author probably deserves an article if they've made multiple article-worthy flash or are simply very well known or influential (like Piconjo, or the crews.) *Administrators are pretty important, so they all deserve articles. As for stat whores, I know pretty little about them. I understand that there are a number of users, most notably Pimp, who vote often in order to get the most exp and blam/save points. I don't actually understand why they do those though: what does a high level get them exactly? I also don't fully understand why the top 50 pretty much consists of the best stuff from the past few months rather than classics. I suppose that people may vote higher for things on the front page, but that doesn't explain why so many classics have relatively low scores. Pico's School is behind 794 other games as I write this. I don't get it. As for deleting categories, I have no idea how to do that yet. But I'll tell you as soon as I find out.--Salnax 03:36, December 29, 2009 (UTC) The Thread Since I made my blog about articles we need to work on, I think we've made quite a bit of progress. Less than half of the top 30 list is left, and we've done some good work on other pages. Admittedly, there are still a few articles that need work, but they shouldn't take too long. As far as I'm concerned, this wiki is ready for more traffic. Like you said, I'm no old hand on the BBS. Besides, it makes more sense for you to start the thread for another reason. If we were to actively converse with people, you could start the thread earlier in the day than I could, while I can work long into the night because of the five hour difference in our schedules (You're a Londoner, I'm a New Yorker). I think that we should just inform people that we exist, provide a link to get here, and tell them that we're always looking for help. Like I've said before, there is no need to say how empty it is around here. If anyone asks, we can just say something along the lines of "there are a few major contributors, as well as some people who check in occasionally." We should also stick around for a while in case anybody has questions. There are a couple of good times to post the thread. Friday is probably a good day to catch a lot of traffic, but I'll be at school and work until 9:00, or 2:00 London time. If we make a thread on Saturday, you can keep an eye on it for a few hours and I'll manage it after 5:00/10:00, when I leave work. I'd imagine that these are the days with the most traffic on Newgrounds.--Salnax 03:04, January 3, 2010 (UTC) Insert Witty Title about users and the Thread Here I know about the list of users. Its the link right under the words "Currently Editing" that says "Active Users." It looks like three other people have checked in so far this year, though none of them contributed. Hopefully, more people will come back if we become more active again. *"Come and visit Wikigrounds. A wiki specially for Newgrounds, with pages about the key authors, submissions, crews, staff, BBS words and phrases. If it isn't there, write it! If you want to start a page, start it! If the page is basic, build it up! Put in relevent pics, info, categories etc. We also need more Watchers to watch for crap and vandalism, though we have nearly 200 registered users already" Nice. I love the 200 registered users part. Its just the right length to get all of the important points across without frightening people with a menacing wall of text. The only thing you're missing is a direct link. The General Forum is probably the best place to post this: nothing else looks even remotely related to what we're doing, and has the most traffic anyway. You can pick the day you post this in advance, so that I can check in on it later. I saw that you edited Wade Fulp's page, so I'm also going to try to work with it a bit. Until next time.--Salnax 23:40, January 4, 2010 (UTC) I discovered the RedDakota alt while looking at Wade's old BBS posts. This one shows him using RedDakota to post extra images. From there, I looked at the other thing RedDakota has done to make sure it fit. He only posted a few times, but they included images the new NG headquarters (from 2001) and some things that match his personality (Taking the Republican side of a debate here. Wish your brother luck for me.--Salnax 00:50, January 5, 2010 (UTC) Yay for Little-Rena! and other things Its good to see that there are at least three people who are willing to really contribute here. He says on his Talk page that he probably won't be very active, but creating two full articles and some edits is encouraging I got your NG message and did a bit of research on the sirtom incident. I made a pretty long article about it. Check it out when you have the chance. Incidentally, I've been sick for the past couple of days, so my activity's been a bit erratic. I'm getting better, but I don't know whether I'm going to be very useful over the next few days. Just so you know--Salnax 00:27, January 8, 2010 (UTC) The Big Day First off, you can find a list of mods about halfway down the page here. It has been an interesting few hours. I've had to delete a twenty or so articles and fix a few vandalized pages, but I think we've had some success. Davidzx made an edit for the first time in three years, and at very least we're getting some attention. I'll keep the topic on page 1 until I go to bed--Salnax 02:36, January 10, 2010 (UTC) Cascading protection and other technical stuff If you see the Recent Changes list and wonder what Wikigrounds:Protect from recreate is for, I'll explain. Cascading protection is a sort of hack to the Mediawiki software done a couple years ago to deal with the problem of how to protect a page from being created, as you can't otherwise protect a page until it exists. Cascading protection is where an existing page is protected, and the non-existing page is transcluded into it so that it can't be created. I'm probably the only one who uses it on a Wikia wiki, but its fairly common on Wikipedia. A simpler alternative may be to just redirect the page to another target and then protect it, but doing it this way stops it from showing up as a random page target. In case you didn't know, I gave you the ability to make other users sysops sometime back in November I think. The page to change someone into a Sysop is . inclusivedisjunction 02:33, January 11, 2010 (UTC) Salnax Again I see you found that new article I made. No, not this one. Seriously though, I noticed this on our to-do list and thought "Why Not?" You asked for me to make it at some point, so there it is. Over the past few days, the thread has had over 1200 views. We've got new people coming and making real contributions. I'm very happy. I'll keep on bumping up the thread for another few days when I can, and then we'll see if we have got ourselves a community.--Salnax 00:35, January 12, 2010 (UTC) Davidzx needs to learn to use Headers Regardless what happens, we cant have people making up random articles just because their names exists, even if NG is full of spammers this if wikigrounds, not encyclopedia dramatica. Wikigrounds has standards as well. plus its run by a different set of people. so there shouldn't be any direct hostility or negative influences.Davidzx 01:06, January 13, 2010 (UTC) Evan 210 Apparently, he's reponsible for a meme that was going around the forums for a while. It was called "Octopus for Mod 09," and he made this alt for the sake of it. The original thread has been deleted, but there were a number of people who joked about "Aquatic Animal for Mod 09" in their signatures. Plus, he's notorious for being banned a lot, has a pair of minor awards, and has a front page submission. Is this article worthy? I'm really not sure about it either way.--Salnax 01:38, January 13, 2010 (UTC) The Next Step To be perfectly frank, I'm just happy that people are paying attention to us for more than a day. Having a club doesn't sound like a half bad idea, if only because it gives us a permanent presence. I think the only real thing we have to do to start a club is to make a post in the Clubs & Crews Forum. This Page contains the basic club rules.--Salnax 01:48, January 13, 2010 (UTC) Wikigrounds History Page Our mission at Wikigrounds is something along the lines of "provide information relevant for the Newgrounds populace." Hence, we have articles on games, movies, authors, artists, websites, and memes. To be perfectly frank, Wikigrounds is not important yet. Maybe someday if we have 500+ articles and are regularly visited as a source of information it would be relevant, but not yet. Besides, what would you write? "This wiki was founded in December 2006. It was popular until September, and its occasionally had a few editors ever since. Some other guy tried to make one, but that failed too." As for the next step, I had a thought. Maybe we've been going at this the wrong way. So far, we've searched Newgrounds for people interested in wikis. Maybe we should check wikis for people interested in Newgrounds. You've done quite a few contributions on Wikipedia, right? Maybe somebody over there, or some other entertainment wiki would be interested. Just a random thought I had.--Salnax 02:44, January 16, 2010 (UTC) Ending the thread with "200 and 200" and the Wikigrounds club would be perfect. From the looks of it, this is going to happen fairly quickly. I look forward tp joining the Wikigrounds club.--Salnax 15:07, January 21, 2010 (UTC) Diagnosing the Problem I saw what you said about the info boxes, so I did a bit of digging, and think I know the problem. Look here. This is the template we use for everbody's profile. It appears on about 100 of our pages. It says that level is Level }. Basically, this means that it gets the icon based on the aura in the box and the number we put for the level. There are two possible problems: 1. We do not have a certain level and aura combo image. 2. Even is we do have have it, it has to be in png format, rather than the common gif or jpeg that we usually use. If the answer is number 1, fixing it is a snap if the png is available. If its number 2, we now have several choices. 1. Find a way to translate jpeg and gif images (which are easier to find) into png images. 2. Make a new template that uses gifs or jpegs. Either way, we have a bit of work ahead. My knowledge of wikis is limited to what I've learned since November, and I doubt you're much better at this sort of thing than I am. Maybe HK knows how to do this easily? Or maybe you should contact Inclusivedisjunction, since he made the template in the first place. In the meantime, I'm going to keep my eyes open for ways to change image types and work on things as normal.--Salnax 23:45, January 23, 2010 (UTC) A Rambling First off, I want you to know that I'm not going to be able to work on the wiki for a few days. I have big tests coming up, so studying comes first. I was thinking about what you said, that we had to determine "what we do." I began looking at a couple of other wikis and came to a conclusion: Newgrounds is a very difficult thing to make a wiki about. First off, we have users, mods, authors, etc. People want to read pages that talk about who they are, their history on and off Newgrounds, and why they're important. However, we then have lots of things that are completely different. For example, look at the Madness Combat wiki. People want something completely different, and focus on plot summaries, major characters, and important items. These require a different style of writing and a different form of research. You'd thing that games would overlap with movies, but just look at any gaming wiki. People care at least as much about getting walkthroughs, advice, and information about the games mechanics at least as much as the games' legacy or story, so games need a unique format too. Crews, Newgrounds Bandwagons, and other distinct categories of topics probably also deserve unique styles. Our best bet is probably not to make as many articles as possible. Editors here need to find one area they're comfortable with, and try to start by making a few top-notch articles that tell everything that people should know. Fortunately, I think we already have a few good examples. Wade Fulp is a great model for other user articles, and Thomas Briggs can be used for people who are important for one big reason. Newgrounds Rumble, one of our most viewed articles, is also a decent example on how to make an article about a game. Our Madness articles are also good, and give the necessary plot summaries, character info, and so forth. If we focus on making articles along these lines, Wikigrounds will be much more valuable to the typical user. Speaking of the typical user, its time we face an ugly truth: even if we become a big hit and a permanent part of the Wiki landscape, most people still won't be editing this site. I read somewhere that 50% of Wikipedia edits are made by 0.7% of users. It probably won't be that bad for us, but we have to consider how few people will actually edit this wiki. About half a million people visit Newgrounds daily. Many of them, however, are not regular users, or are not members. A large portion of these people won't care much about Newgrounds's history, crews, or important users, and just watch Flash. No matter how hard we try, most of these people will probably never know Wikigrounds exists. Even then, there will be people who don't care about or trust wikis in general and us in particular. Best likely scenario: we end up with a couple hundred users, of whom a couple dozen actually do any editing. I'm fine with this. A few hundred people using this site would be awesome. But unless we get on Newgrounds's front page or something crazy like that, our growth will be limited. Considering how many different kinds of articles there are to edit, we're going to need to either have a few really dedicated editors, or some specialization going around. So, as for our club? We should start by once again saying what Wikigrounds is, but this time, we should not emphasize the fact that they can edit it. We should emphasize how useful it is, and help the people who like the site become skilled editors. After all, people don't use encyclopedias to write articles; they use encyclopedias to get info. Wow, I just rambled on, didn't I? Well, thanks for reading this mess. I'll be back in a couple of days.--Salnax 19:49, January 25, 2010 (UTC) Reviews http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/336255/124 HIYA = Thankz for creating this wiki it means alot to us ngers plz maintain it ): IWANTBRAINZ 26th Jan What he said! Thanks a lot! Unreg. 26th Jan I'm going on a trip this weekend, so I'm disappearing for a few days. Rock on.--Salnax 03:27, February 5, 2010 (UTC) Madness wiki, Themed months, and a Suggestion I left a message for Aggregation of the Madness Combat wiki about linking our articles. MKWRX is technically the director, but he's locked his talk page, and Aggregation's an admin anyway, so why not? -Aggregation is the main man there, we talk. Keep it up. As you can see, I updated the front page to announce that this month is BBS month. Still, I think that we would get some more traffic if we combined this with the creation of the Wikigrounds Club at Newgrounds. I know you really wanted 200 members first, but we've slowed down to a trickle, and the Club might be the best way to reach 200 anyway. We have 195 registered users, 27 of whom have logged in this month and 7 of whom have edited. Let's keep the ball rolling.--Salnax 02:55, February 9, 2010 (UTC) -I have been thinking the same for a while. We will lose momentum if we don't. Expect it within the next week, regardless of the User number. Icedragon64 15:20, February 9, 2010 (UTC) A useful template Look what I found while browsing through some of our old stuff. -Choose one sub- maybe the next one you make and try it. We three (Hibiscus) can look at it and see how we feel. How do you actually use it? I see the description on the page, but how do you make this thing appear on the page. I have always copied and pasted an existing one, then edited it; I don't really understand templates/infoboxes. Look at this one too! We can modify it for our mod articles! -talk to Hibiscus- I'm happy if she is. Icedragon64 15:14, February 9, 2010 (UTC) Madness Details If I were to look for information bout a Madness episode on Wikigrounds, I'd want a quick plot summary, the reception on Newgrounds, and maybe a few key turning points for the series. If I wanted a blow-by-blow summary of the fights, character death counts, or other specific details, I should go to the Madness wiki. Look out our Super Mario Bros. Z article, then compare it to a typical article on the SMBZ wiki. We don't need the script, or the list of who appeared when, or even every minor character. Similar measures should apply for the characters. If anything, some of our articles might be too long (Tricky is our 6th longest article!). We can just state who a character is, when they appear, and what important stuff they do. When it comes to weapons and other items, we should only have articles if they are unique weapons for the series. 1337 sword is good, but we don't need an article on obscure weapons like this.--Salnax 02:33, February 10, 2010 (UTC)